Neoliberalism and American Policy towards Latin America



This paper answers two questions; one regarding the success and failures of neo-liberalism and the other being on the policies of a newly-elected American President towards the Latin America.

Q1: Neoliberalism Success and Failures

Neoliberalism is the most dominant ideological doctrine influencing global economic policy at today's socio-historical moment. It is nevertheless a term rarely uttered by the mass media and thus is largely unknown, especially in the United States (Bakan, 12). The doctrine relies heavily on an interpretation of classical economic liberalism. Corporate advocates of neoliberalism base their arguments, in part, on a reading of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations that claims society and its citizens will flourish in a system structured by an unregulated market.

One of the major successes of neoliberalism is the strong belief in, and preference for, free markets that are allowed to self-regulate without outside interventions. Neoliberal ideology holds that the market should dictate the rules of society and not vice versa (Campbell, 35). From this premise, it follows that for markets to function properly, all state and collective interventions in the market must be removed. For example, state-instituted measures to lessen unemployment would be considered to be detrimental to the market because they would impede on the market's ability to self-regulate, with the idea being that unemployment may actually be in the best interest of the market. Neoliberalism currently is a very important and influential economic theory, one that shapes the daily lives of countless people across the globe.

In the opinion of the critics, the major failure of the neoliberalism philosophy is that on the ground, neoliberalism creates an ever widening gap between the rich and the poor and increasingly high levels of global poverty. If the market is left alone, it will only make the rich richer and the poor poorer; they believe that intervention is necessary to create equality. Neoliberalism is criticized for the manner in which it blames individuals for their economic problems and refuses to examine more systemic issues such as racism (Cavanagh, 48).

Neoliberalism has utterly failed to address the problems of the under-developed and the developing countries and they are concerned about the fact that if the concept of neo-liberalism sustains the market economy in those countries will suffer a lot due to the practices prevailing in the post-WTO regime that calls for free market economy. Now the concept of free-market economy entails ...